Yao

Yao is a former paramedic who becomes one of Masha’s closest colleagues at Tranquillum House. His story turns on a recurring tension between care and control: an early failure to recognize a cardiac arrest leaves him haunted by the limits of his judgment, while his later work in a retreat built around surveillance and intervention gives him a new purpose. That purpose culminates in his participation in an unauthorized psychedelic program, an experience he regards as transformative even as it brings serious consequences.

Identity and Background

Before joining Tranquillum House, Yao worked as a paramedic. His training taught him to observe a patient and their surroundings for diagnostic clues, an approach he later recalled as instruction from his supervisor, Finn. But observation could not protect him from a mistaken certainty. During a call to a corporate office, Yao initially understood a woman’s seizure-like symptoms as a seizure. Finn told him to begin chest compressions; Yao froze briefly while trying to process the change in what he thought was happening. The patient, Masha, was in cardiac arrest. The paramedics shocked her twice but could not establish a consistent rhythm, and she was carried from the office. Yao later remembered that instant of inaction as a permanent failure of his most trusted instrument: his own mind.

Yao’s subsequent ambulance work brought mounting strain rather than recovery. Finn moved interstate, and the service transferred Yao to a regional area where he knew no one and where calls often involved violence and drugs. On one call, a man threatened him with a knife while demanding that he save a woman who was already dead; after police arrived, the man lunged at them and was shot, and Yao ended up saving his life. Yao returned to work, but two days later he experienced what felt like a catastrophic mental collapse just as his alarm went off. He feared a brain bleed and was admitted to a psychiatric ward. His past also included the death of his car and stress-related dermatitis, details that sit alongside this breakdown as signs of how much pressure had accumulated.

Recovery and Work at Tranquillum House

Masha had been Yao’s patient, but after his breakdown he contacted her and said he had not been well and might come to her house for a few days of rest. When he arrived, he did not recognize her at first. She welcomed him and promised to make him well. Yao later sought to offer new arrivals the same impression of rescue and reassurance, like land appearing to someone lost at sea.

His recovery became an intensive shared life with Masha. She cooked for him and taught him meditation and yoga; they practiced tai chi together and spent three months alone at the house. Their relationship was close but not sexual. Yao described the period as a journey and a rejuvenation: his body grew stronger as his mind healed, and he felt he had become someone else, with a peace and certainty he had never known before. The transformation supplied a powerful personal precedent for Masha’s promise that people could be remade at Tranquillum House.

As a staff member, Yao helped give the retreat its composed, welcoming face. He greeted guests in a white uniform and carefully measured manner, and he took personal pride in the package’s complimentary spa treatments. He also conducted medical intake: when Frances was told that blood tests were part of the process, Yao explained that he had once been a paramedic, clarifying that this was a former occupation, not a claim about a past life. His medical background gave the retreat’s procedures an air of clinical legitimacy, even as the boundary between hospitality and medical oversight became increasingly blurred.

That oversight extended beyond individual appointments. Masha had security cameras installed around the property, monitored guest activity, and arranged for bags to be checked; Yao later used the security program at his computer to view much of the group. At nightly staff meetings, he and Delilah gave Masha status updates. He was therefore both caregiver and observer within an institution that treated monitoring as part of looking after its guests.

Relationships and Professional Judgment

Yao’s bond with Masha grew out of his recovery and became the foundation of his work at the retreat. Her care helped him rebuild his life after the psychiatric crisis, and he wanted to recreate for arriving guests the feeling she had given him. The asymmetry in their relationship is consequential: Masha had been the person who restored him, and he joined her project with trust shaped by gratitude and his own experience of change.

His relationship with Delilah was collegial, but their views diverged when the retreat’s psychedelic session left guests confined in the meditation studio. As time passed, both Yao and Delilah said they thought the guests should be let out or given a clue. Masha insisted they needed to find their way out as part of a rebirthing process. Their concern shows that Yao could recognize the danger of the situation, but it did not undo his participation in the wider program.

Yao also tried to connect with guests through personal conversation. When Frances needed distraction, he became the subject of her questions about the emotional aftermath of leaving professional football, a topic she connected to her own sense that her career might be ending. Later, while Frances was on a stretcher, Yao sat beside her and removed her headphones so she could hear him. She described herself as being inside a story she was writing, with a magic-realist quality in which nothing needed to make sense. The exchange places him in a caring, attentive role amid the guests’ altered experiences, though it also belongs to a retreat where those experiences had been produced through drugs administered without their consent.

Psychedelic Program and Consequences

Yao’s own psychedelic experience strengthened his conviction that the treatment could be valuable. He described a journey through a tunnel, possibly like a waterslide, that ended in a cinema where he watched and re-experienced his life from birth through his arrival at Tranquillum House. He understood his past differently: he had loved his former fiancée Bernadette more than she loved him, his parents had not been suited to each other, and the work of a paramedic was a poor fit for his temperament because bursts of adrenaline depleted rather than energized him. Most significantly, he traced his fear of making mistakes to childhood. The experience offered him a story of self-understanding that seemed to explain both his former career and his later collapse.

That conviction helped make Masha’s program persuasive to him. Yao thought the guests’ insights could be banal beside his own, but he still considered the therapy transformative and later said he would never regret it, even if medicating the guests had been a mistake. His assessment reflects a central conflict in his arc: he could acknowledge the failure of consent while continuing to value the outcome. When the group’s experience turned into confinement, he and Delilah raised the possibility of releasing the guests, yet Masha’s belief in the necessity of the ordeal prevailed.

Yao’s medical role also surfaced in a moment of panic when Jessica appeared to be pregnant during the session. Watching live footage in Masha’s office, he insisted that she was not pregnant and said he would never have allowed a pregnant woman to take those substances. The episode reveals how much the staff’s safety depended on their ability to assess guests under extraordinary circumstances—and how quickly uncertainty could expose the limits of the safeguards they had put in place.

After the events at Tranquillum House, police took Yao away in a car to make a statement. Before leaving, he apologized to the guests, appearing sad, defeated, and ashamed. Later, he pleaded guilty for his role and received a fourteen-month suspended jail sentence. Masha told police she alone was responsible for the new protocol and described her employees as oblivious and obedient; she also said she had mixed the smoothies, which was true. But Yao had been beside her, checking and double-checking the dosages. His parents were angry and could not understand his actions, and Yao himself often struggled to understand how reasonable the plan had seemed at the time, given its prestigious researchers and journal papers.

Change and Narrative Significance

Yao’s later life gives his transformation a concrete aftermath rather than a clean resolution. He becomes a stay-at-home father in the suburbs, a new role that feels to him like having been parachuted into another life. The suspended sentence remains part of that life, as does the gap between his earlier certainty and his later difficulty comprehending his decisions. His mother says Masha had him in a trance, and she vehemently denies that an incident Yao remembered during psychedelic therapy ever happened. The memory therefore remains contested within his family rather than becoming a settled explanation for his conduct.

Yao’s arc links two moments of compromised judgment. Early in his career, he was so convinced that a patient was having a seizure that he briefly failed to act on the possibility of cardiac arrest. At Tranquillum House, confidence takes a different form: belief in Masha, in the apparent authority of research, and in the therapeutic value of transformation helps him participate in a program whose risks and lack of consent become undeniable. The parallel does not make the two events equivalent, but it gives his story a recurring question: how can a person distinguish careful observation from a conviction that has already narrowed what he is able to see?

The novel also places Yao at the crossing of medical and institutional authority. At first, his paramedic experience is a qualification that reassures guests; later, it helps lend clinical credibility to procedures conducted in a retreat with cameras, medical checks, and drug protocols. His own recovery makes the promised transformation feel real to him, but personal benefit cannot guarantee safety or consent for others. His apology and sentence mark the cost of that distinction, while his later family life shows that the consequences continue beyond the retreat.